Understanding your garden emotionally

Goodness me. What an entrance autumn has made. My cottage, cave-like at the best of times, is dark. The rain is hammering onto the kitchen garden and any leaves that were far enough on the turn (mostly the cherries and the amelanchiers which had just taken on their most beautiful scarlet) are a sodden mess on the grass. I’ve had to remember which socks give me blisters with my wellies and the tweed scarf has provided much needed fortitude in facing the evening dog walk in dusk. 

So much for the rusts and bracken golds of the autumn of dreams. This is weather for retreat. For soup and socks. 

Usually I would be thinking about the garden reviewing process in November. After the end of year clear up (not too tidy, the wildlife won’t thank you) and before the Christmas sparkles are out of the box. But now seems as good as time as any, especially as this weather brings rather forcibly to mind that we are at the mercy of our climate, that we are unavoidably bound up with the air that we breathe, the sun that shines on our skin, and the rain that falls on our plants. 

From the safety indoors if you can, with a good coat and stout boots on if you can’t, take a bit of time to look at your garden with a bit of distance. Emotional distance, physical distance. Take photos, look back through your phone at pictures you took during the year. Before you judge (it or yourself), before you leap to any big conclusions or resolutions for next season, let’s ask the one question that rules them all. 

What is your garden for?

Your first answer might be simple. Flowers. Some leaves to eat in summer. For food. For beauty. To hide the neighbour’s washing line. For somewhere to sit in the summer. Can I invite you to get a little deeper?

If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said that my garden was an expression of pure defiance. It was created in response to abuse and bullying at work and it was a way of me making sense of myself out of the context of my job. Desperately trying to find an identity that was separate to being a psychologist. I knew about gardening but not a lot about flower farming. There were lots of rows of things, trees that were planted as maiden whips, annuals. It was tentative but it was there. I was there. 

My next intentions for my field were for shameless bait. I really wanted my seeds to be featured in glossy magazines. (I have seen through many of the capitalism seductions now, but the sleekness of Gardens Illustrated still creeps under my defences) and I thought if I had a cutting edge, professionally designed, Zeitgeist-reflecting field of matrix planting, then photographers would queue up to feature it. A domestic Hauser & Wirth. They didn’t of course (although have you seen The Simple Things this month? I’ve made it in a very small way…) and because I didn’t design it, I didn’t love it like it was mine. The heights were wrong. The plants were wrong. It just wasn’t me. 

So now? What do I want now? This last year has seen a huge shift in how I see the world and my own place in it. I think as I start to distance myself more from my job, I realise how important the bigger picture is to me. The world beyond the Instagram squares, the reality of the lives of people who have not had all the privilege and the lucky throw of the dice that I have had. Maybe it’s guilt, but if I leave child protection behind, can it all just be David Austins and artfully ruffled linen tablecloths? I think you can guess the answer to that. 

And so the eyes that are looking at my field are radical eyes. The-time-is-now eyes. The oh my god, we have got to do something because we cannot rely on the white men in power to EVER do the right thing for anyone except themselves. Except possibly when they are trying to do the right thing for their cronies and Dido Harding eyes. 

Revolutionary eyes. 

And so I have printed out the ground plans again, and there will be revolutionary planting. The inner squares of my flower growing area will be gifted to my village and will form a micro-farm for growing food for my community. It is looking like a very real possibility that we will be offered a larger plot of land next year but we cannot wait. It is so tempting to put off change until it is easy. And for every hour, every month, every year we put it off, the temperature rises. The rich get richer. The sea levels put more land and more people at risk. 

So this year, what my garden is for is for being the change that I care about. Composting practices that take carbon out of the atmosphere, that increase the biodiversity of my soil, that grows food (and flowers) that massively reduces the number of plastic bags of lettuce that are bought by me and my neighbours and the shuttle runs to the little Sainsburys on the south edge of Taunton. 

You may notice the shift in the business too. We are making big changes in the packaging we source and how we buy in seeds. It will mean that we are not going to be selling some of the really popular bred (and therefore owned by the big seed companies) cut flower seeds, we are going to be moving to only open-pollinated varieties of seeds. In the short term, it is likely that we will lose business because we won’t stock Rudbeckia Sahara, but that will just have to be what it is. As we are going to be buying in, we are going through the process of selecting which seed producers we want to financially support and to source from. Small, family owned, organic. Biodynamic where possible. The Seed Cooperative, Vital-Seeds. 

Vegetable seeds will be added to the shop. More recipes. A Kitchen Garden journal. Kale amongst the cosmos. Nasturtium flowers in a jar and leaves on a plate. 

I’ll be sharing all these shifts and changes in Gather, of course. And I do hope you will join me in your own way.

Revolution starts at home. Or in the garden anyway.